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William T. Bagwell-Holden was the short-lived father of James Marion Bagwell, and was born in 1840 as the only son of Hardy H. Holden and Elizabeth King. Just a few years after his father's death either just before or just after William's birth, his mother Elizabeth (King) Holden remarried John J. Bagwell in Pike County in 1843, where William was raised in the Bagwell household. John Bagwell was officially made William's guardian there on April 2, 1855, and during this same period William married Martha A. Buntyn (born 1840), daughter of Spalding County neighbors Joseph E. Buntyn and Elizabeth Matthews. The only son of William Bagwell-Holden and Martha Buntyn, who later went by the name James Marion Bagwell, was born on May 1, 1856. William died very soon after James' birth, and his $300 estate (under the name William T. Holden) was later administered by his adoptive father John J. Bagwell with his father-in-law Joseph Buntyn as security after their 1863 petition in Spalding County.
Martha Buntyn later used the Bagwell surname, and she and her young son James lived on her father's farm throughout the Civil War years (James later recalled the corn popping as his grandfather's barn was burned by Union soldiers in 1864). On December 15, 1868, Martha married James William Brown (9 years younger than Martha, and only 7 years older than Martha's first son James) and subsequently moved to neighboring Meriwether County. Martha had at least three more sons by her second husband during the early 1870s, before her first son by William Bagwell married in 1875. Details of Martha's later life have not yet been researched.
Child of William T. Bagwell-Holden and Martha A. Buntyn
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